Description:

Drawn from the Ackland Art Museum collection, the University of North Carolina's rare book collection and private collections, "Apocalypse Then" presents works of art inspired by apocalyptic writing and thought. Beginning with sixteen woodcuts from Albrecht Dürer's "Apocalypse with Pictures," the exhibition includes works from the following five hundred years. Besides including interpretations of the Book of Revelation by Dürer, Gustave Doré and Odilon Redon, other works in the exhibition reveal how artists have adapted apocalyptic imagery to political, social and personal concerns. They show responses of artists as diverse as Edouard Manet, Georges Rouault, Rockwell Kent and Philip Guston to war and revolution, and of William Hogarth, William Blake, Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns to the inevitability of evil and death.